A perfect garden lunch is the stuff of dreams. A sprawl of smiling friends, a tablecloth that flutters gently, an assortment of glasses and bottles of wine. This scene has been painted, photographed and filmed (you can never remember the name of the film, but French scenes are invariably presided over by Kristin Scott Thomas and Italian ones feature garrulous families on the verge of implosion). The food does not take centre stage. Broad shallow bowls of vegetables and salads are passed with nonchalance.

I went to one such lunch as an impressionable teenager in France. The food was memorable for being unremarkable. Cold roast beef, green beans in a garlicky dressing, tomato salad, bread. Agnès, the hostess, dispensed it all with a taken-for-granted elegance (though she was only in her mid twenties). The peaches, served for dessert, were bottled rather than homecooked, but nobody noticed or cared. In fact, the lunch was successful precisely because Agnès hadn’t worked at it.

This is why the perfect garden lunch is difficult to pull off. In our efforts to be generous and cater for all tastes we make dishes that are complicated and cook too many of them. We put so much work into the event that the food needs to be praised, thus stopping the flow of conversation. You, the host or hostess, are busy back-timing dishes in a hot kitchen rather than chatting at the table. By the time your guests leave you are exhausted, and a sense of anticlimax descends as you wrap leftovers in clingfilm and shove them into the fridge. It has not been the relaxed affair you envisaged.

But it’s difficult, if it isn’t part of your birthright, to present food with the perfect level of casualness. So this is your challenge: to make a lunch that doesn’t frazzle you, where the food is good but not spectacular in that “look what I’ve made” kind of way, and the number of dishes is limited. Good and enthusiastic cooks find it hard not to add a little bit more. But resist. (I don’t say this from a position of superiority. I am not, sadly, like Agnès. I have to discipline myself.) You don’t need a starter, and this joint is perfect at room temperature – and pretty effortless. Raspberries and cream, or peaches that your guests can slice into glasses of cold dessert wine, would be lovely afterwards. “Less is more”, “faites simple” – choose whatever mantra helps, and you, the cook, will be as happy as your guests.